Cultural Memory and the Hebrew Bible

By Ronald Hendel
Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies
University of California, Berkeley
July 2011

While scrolling through the pages of this website, I was pleased to come across an article by Philip Davies titled Biblical History and Cultural
Memory.1 Having made some contributions myself to this
topic over the last decade, I was curious to see what Philip had to say. Since he and I start from quite different premises, I always experience a shock of
surprise when we agree on something. In this instance, much to my pleasure, we agree that the concept of cultural memory solves some important
problems in the study of ancient Israelite history and literature. But also, not surprisingly, I differ with Philip on where we should go with this
concept.

He aptly summarizes the main virtue of the concept of cultural memory:

Its particular value is its recognition not only that the past is always something created rather than simply recorded but also that
recollection serves to create and sustain identity. Thus, while the effect of memory is to reproduce the past, its function is in truth orientated towards
the present, to which the past is constantly adjusting itself.

Cultural memory (re)produces a past with present relevance, and since the relation between the remembered past and the present shifts with every
generation, this remembered past is continually revised to suit present circumstances, including political, religious, institutional, geographical, and
family relationships. In cultural memory, to paraphrase master Yoda, always in motion is the past.

As Philip further observes, the value of cultural memory is to focus the attention on the memory itself rather than the event it
conjures. This is quite good. But then he goes on to say: The old dichotomies of history vs. fiction or
truth vs. falsehood are obsolete. Here I both agree and disagree. It is indeed a virtue of cultural memory to place our
focus beyond these dichotomies. But it doesnt take us out of their scope altogether  rather, it complicates their interrelationship. Both
sides of these dichotomies are included in a dialectical fashion in cultural memory, such that history/fiction and truth/falsehood are interwoven in its
discourse. The stories of the patriarchs or the Exodus or the battle of Jericho include history and fiction, truth (of various kinds) and falsehoods (of
various kinds), held together by their present relevance, the authority of tradition, and the narrative artistry of the writers. I have made some forays
into the mnemohistory of these biblical texts,2 and
I submit that this approach yields more fruit than conventional historical scholarship that limits its scope to adjudicating between these old
dichotomies.

This is where I diverge from Philips approach. He starts at the right place, but he stops too soon. After introducing the concept of cultural
memory, he swerves back into his old habits (this is not a major criticism, since its a very human trait) and takes a stand on one side of these old
dichotomies. He berates scholars who try and chase the chimera of a fictitious 12-tribe nation [of Israel] which he claims to have
demonstrated is unhistorical and false. But the point of cultural memory is to chase the memory itself, how it is constructed out of history and fiction,
and how it produces, on various levels, the identity that it describes. I would locate the circulation of this memory much earlier than Philip does, but
the dates are relatively trivial compared to the productive meanings (social, historical, literary, and religious) that circulate in such core cultural
memories.

Similarly, Philip says that we now know that very many biblical images of the past (patriarchs, exodus, wandering, conquest, perhaps David and
Solomon, too) are not authentic ones. This remark also misses the point of cultural memory. They are indeed authentic as biblical
images of the past. This is the point. By their multifaceted representation of the past, these narratives of cultural memory enable us to pursue a
richer form of scholarship than if they were merely an objective chronicle of events (note the scare quotes, although I submit that in some
sense we still need this word for historical work, if only as a regulative ideal). In other words, seeing these biblical texts as good or
bad history is a category mistake. Cultural memory is a more accurate category, which enables us to pursue a more sophisticated scholarship.

Hence I disagree with Philips contention that the concept of cultural memory supports what he calls the minimalist option in biblical
studies.3 It does no such thing. The minimalist/maximalist
dichotomy, as far as I understand it, becomes obsolete in light of the concept of cultural memory. The truth (if I may use this word in its everyday
sense) is more complicated than this dichotomy allows. The pursuit of cultural memory in biblical studies has the potential to complicate and reconfigure
many dubious dichotomies in our field, including maximalism/minimalism, history/fiction, diachronic/synchronic, and perhaps even postmodern/modern. And as
Philip and I agree (to my pleasure), it also implicates post-biblical and modern memories of the biblical past, and how such memories are revitalized and
contested in each generation.

Comments (5)

But aren't there events that actually happened. Aren't we obliged to try to reconstruct those and to use them as a point of comparison with with later cultural memory?

#1 - Helena Constantine - 07/14/2011 - 16:59

Yes, certainly. This is why I wrote that cultural memory "is constructed out of history and fiction." It is our responsibility as scholars to investigate, to the degree we can, the interrelationship of history and fiction in the texts, which means, in part, exploring the "actual" historical details and events in them, and how they have been reconstituted as memorable discourse. Thanks for bringing up this important point.

#2 - Ron Hendel - 07/14/2011 - 21:47

I am a fan of Ron, who is a scholar and a gentleman, and I enjoy both agreeing and disagreeing with him. All I think I want to say in response is that all stories about the past are fiction in the sense of being constructed as narratives (even our modern critical reconstructions). But I agree (and have made the point in print) that in evaluating memories we need to know as much as we can about the facts of the past, otherwise our analysis and understanding of these memories cannot be complete. If, as it may well be, I have misrepresented myself on these issues, I hope this reply makes clear.

#3 - philip davies - 07/15/2011 - 04:49

"The difference between history, which is one type of fiction, and romance, which is an altogether different type of fiction, is that the historian tries to avoid communicating what was not so." — Baruch Halpern

#4 - Raymond Wood - 07/15/2011 - 11:14

Or as Paul Veyne nicely says, history is "a true novel." The virtue of the category of cultural memory is that in allows us to see more clearly the interrelation of historical, literary, traditional, and socio-political dimensions of the biblical representations of the past. And, further, it links these interests with the ways that postbiblical and modern cultural memories reconstitute the biblical memories. Hence the category of cultural memory offers, I suggest, a way of breaking down some disciplinary boundaries and renewing our field. Of course, I'm probably being utopian in dreaming this.

#5 - Ron Hendel - 07/15/2011 - 14:54

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